New Regs Drive Content Management Business

Companies have been glutted with data for years, but a raft of post-Enron regulations have now made it imperative for them to get a better grip on their information and how it can be parsed, sorted and managed.

While content management as a concept has always been fairly well understood by publishers, now manufacturing companies and others are beginning to see the light, said Lynda Brooks, vice president of sales and marketing at ThomasTech Solutions, a Horsham, Pa.-based integrator.

"Industry is waking up to the fact that there's such a thing as content management and that they are already, in fact, publishers. They just never realized it," Brooks said.

Every company has parts numbers and inventory information that are critical for internal and external use, she said. "Companies need to capture that stuff as it's developed and make sure they're never in a situation where they're using an outdated CAD drawing to make a machine," Brooks said. "That kind of stuff happens all the time."

And, manufacturers are finding that more of their partners and customers want to work with information that's 100 percent electronic, she said.

New mandates from the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, for example, require the archiving of all relevant communications including e-mail and instant messaging, along with other financial data that must be readily and quickly available.

Products addressing these and related needs will be front and center at the AIIM Exposition & Conference and the On Demand Digital Printing & Publishing Conference in New York this week.

At AIIM, Sun Microsystems plans to announce the availability of its Sun ONE Collaborative Business Platform, which bundles e-mail, instant messaging, calendaring and scheduling, content sharing, portal services and identity management. The company also said it plans to launch its iForce Content Network, under which 30 or so partners will be dedicated to developing data management solutions.

Imaging and photo pioneer Eastman Kodak plans to demonstrate how it integrated its Kodak Capture Software Version 6.0 with JPMorgan Chase Bank's i-Vault. The solution promises that businesses will be able to scan in documents at high speeds and automatically load those images into i-Vault, an electronic storage environment. Eastman Kodak also plans to announce that it will bundle a scaled-down version of the I.R.I.S. Group's PDF-conversion software, IRISPdf, with Kodak Capture. IRISPdf generates searchable PDF files using I.R.I.S.' OCR engine.

Meanwhile, IBM is expected to talk about how it worked with partners Ancept, RightsLine and Telestream to build a high-end digital asset management system for Sesame Street. The networked system, which is still under development, will allow Sesame Workshop editing, post-production, sales, marketing and research personnel to find and deliver programming and related material easily through a Web browser, IBM executives said.

The system is built on IBM's DB2 Content Manager and DB2 Universal database. Telestream technology encodes the content, Ancept's Media Server sits at the front end of the content management repository, and a RightsLine offering is used to secure the content with appropriate tags and usage rights.

Vignette, Austin, Texas, is expected to announce the integration of its Content Management and Portal suites into one offering called the Vignette Application Business Suite, whose licensing will start at about $125,000.

The suite's various functions will be managed through a single, merged console, Vignette executives said. Vignette, long a content management power, got into the portal business via its $32 million acquisition of Epicentric last October. Now the company is trying to combine all of its offerings into a coherent suite.

Vignette rival Interwoven is expected to announce the general availability of the Collaborative Document Management solution, developed jointly with iManage. The partnership, which was announced last February, promised to provide a solution that handles the entire collaborative document life cycle, from team sharing and structured document development to fully automated and secure document publishing and dissemination.

Last week, Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Interwoven said its president and CEO, John Van Siclen, resigned. Martin Brauns, chairman of the company, will serve as interim CEO until a permanent successor is found.

On the same day, Interwoven said it expects revenue for its fiscal quarter ended March 31 to range from $24.5 million to $25.5 million--a loss of 9 cents to 10 cents per share.

In other content management news last week, FileNet said it would buy e-forms maker Shana for $8.5 million. Click here for more information.